We (Ashley Contreras and Elle Emery) are spending a 6 week stint at PGC (Polar Geospatial Center) on the University of Minnesota campus working on processing Antarctic satellite imagery. We are Colorado College seniors working with Christine Siddoway as a part of her NSF work in Western Antarctica (WANT). As for our work on the project; we are focusing on the Fosdick Mountains and the Marie Byrd Land volcanoes (MBL) as priority areas to complete the process of orthorectifying (the act of processing an aerial photograph to geometrically correct it so that the scale of the photograph is uniform and it can be measured as a map) imagery and hopefully overlaying that imagery on DEMs (digital elevation models) of the MBL region. We are interested in applying the findings in this imagery (hopefully we will see some bedrock faults in the DEMs!) to the geology of the region for senior theses/projects with Christine.
We are about half way done with our work here at PGC and well on our way to some really cool results. Data processing is a V E R Y slow operation that can take days. We have been working on ordering/finding new imagery to orthorectify while the DEMs process—but as you can imagine, the computer only moves so fast, even the best one. Everyone seems to be in awe of ours since it’s super fancy (Do you know anything about 16 core computers? Yeah, neither did we.).
In addition to our long days of work we have been exploring a bit of Minneapolis. We have seen a play and walked around downtown a bit, and even spent a weekend on Lake Minnetonka with some family friends jet skiing, tubing (see photo), and relaxing. Next stop: Mall of America (and possibly a spoon at the Walker Art Museum that everyone keeps telling us we need to see).
Anyway, we’re hoping to have some great results for GSA reveal in October 2011!
-Ash and Elle
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| Tubing on Lake Minnetonka |
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| Pillsbury Hall-Home to PGC |
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| Elle and Ash at work in PGC |
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